Sunday 1 November 2026
Ebola deaths in Congo pass 5,000 in the country's deadliest outbreak, with no vaccine for the strain behind it
More than 5,000 people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Ebola outbreak, government figures reported this weekend show, 5,026 deaths among 10,351 confirmed cases as of October 31, a fatality rate of 48.6 percent. The outbreak, declared in May, is the deadliest in Congo's history and the second largest Ebola outbreak on record. It is driven by the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, for which there is no approved vaccine and no specific treatment. Cases have also been confirmed in Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria. The World Health Organization's Africa office says ending it will take a continued scale up of control measures and better access to the areas hit.
The numbers passed a mark this weekend that health officials had been dreading since August, when this outbreak became the worst Congo has recorded. The health ministry's latest count, reported by the presidential task force on Friday, stands at 10,351 confirmed cases and 5,026 deaths as of October 31. Another 2,788 people have recovered. Seventy seven new cases and 34 more deaths were in the latest daily report alone.
The epicentre is Ituri province in the north east, which holds about 71 percent of confirmed cases. Ituri is a conflict zone, and fighting there has made the virus harder to contain. Attacks on response teams and insecurity have kept health workers out of communities they need to reach. The outbreak has spread to 67 of the country's 178 health zones across eight of its 26 provinces, and 50 of those zones still had active cases in the latest report. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention says about eight in ten new cases are appearing outside the chains of contacts that health workers are monitoring, which is the pattern that lets an epidemic keep growing unseen.
The strain is part of the problem. This is Bundibugyo virus, not the Zaire strain behind most earlier outbreaks. The vaccines and treatments developed for Zaire Ebola do not cover it, so doctors are treating symptoms and isolating patients, with no specific tool against the virus itself. The WHO estimates that about a third of all deaths happened without the patient receiving any medical care at all.
Dr. Patrick Otim, a programme manager with the WHO, called the 5,000 death milestone a very tragic figure and said it is not just a number. The outbreak is Congo's 17th, and it now stands behind only the 2014 to 2016 West Africa epidemic, which killed more than 11,000 people, in the history of the disease. Kenya has confirmed nine cases and two deaths, and cases linked to the outbreak have been recorded in Uganda and Nigeria, which is how a national epidemic becomes a regional one. Two suspected cases in Nigeria's Yola tested negative this weekend, a small piece of good news inside a toll that is still climbing.
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